What is with the wooden cow?

The statues of the cows are quite new additions to a beautiful little park in West Sussex. Not having been to the park for sometime, the cows seem to have appeared from nowhere, and quickly become part of the landscape. Worth Park was once the ancient forest of Worth, before making way for the estate owned by the Wiston family and later, purchased by Joseph Montefiore. The Montefiore family are said to have grazed herds of prize-winning Jersey cows on the parkland. Ha-has (walled ditches) were commonly built to protect the formal gardens from straying animals and for this reason, the wooden cows have been situated close to the haha.

Seeing them for the first time on the Beginners Poetry Course, I was uncertain of them; I wanted them to be real, not the fakes that they were, wooden, inanimate. But I couldn’t forget them; their presence niggled at me and I knew that they were to be the subject of at least one poem. There was a homely feel to these oddities, a serenity that invited confidences from passers-by.

And that was where it all began.

But why add this today? I spoke to someone this morning of someone who had found the poems at the park and asked me if I was the poet. I had almost forgotten about the poems I wrote then and it was so nice to be reminded.

For more information about the park and its history, http://www.worthparkfriends.org/our%20park.htm

Like this:

Rupert Brooke

The Soldier

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.